At 6:31 PM -0400 8/26/09, John C Klensin wrote:
>I believe that
>the integrity of the system and the preservation of a reasonable
>level of openness and transparency requires that, if a document
>comes out of a stream and into the RFC Editor process, any
>"approved but not really" holds need to be explicit, exposed to
>the community, and involve the RSE (at least at a notification
>level). That is independent of the conditions under which a
>hold request should be honored: I am focused here only on
>avoiding back channels and actions for which no one needs to
>take public responsibility.
+1
>I hope that, under the new Model, any suggestion for a
>non-editorial change at AUTH48 gets the document immediately
>returned to the stream approver body for instructions.
+1. Further, we should be sure that such stream approval happened regardless of who asked for the change. For example, in the IETF stream, even if the AD responsible for the WG that produced a draft asks for a non-editorial change, notice of that should be made publicly.
>I also
>believe that evaluation of whether a change is substantive will
>have to be sorted out between the Production House and RSE if
>there is any possible doubt (such decisions affect the quality
>and integrity of the Series).
+1
>I would also hope that there
>would be no mechanism for anyone to prevent posting of a
>document that had gone through AUTH48, been signed off on by all
>relevant parties, and properly released from the Production
>House to the Publisher. That is, once a document goes over that
>wall, no one gets to impose a hold.
Darn, we were doing so well. -1 on this: I think that the RSE, the person who is the public face on the RFC series and the one responsible for errors, should be able to stop a document at any point before actual publication. HOWEVER, given that cases of this would be exceptional, there needs to be public notice of the stall, hopefully including a reason.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium